Darkness
by The-Lady-Isis
Summary: The darkness hides what can shine for itself. DON'T OWN, review please!
1. Darkness

**Darkness**

Sometimes I'm not sure which way is up. Which way is down, or sideways. Whether I'm flying or falling. It's so _wrong_. When we're together, nothing touches our bliss. It doesn't matter that we're separated by a chasm that in harsh daylight would be too wide a gulf to traverse. In daylight too many things are proven false; too many illusions are shattered.

Not so in the welcoming, embracing dark. Scars fade, flaws go undetected. The darkness is big enough to swallow my demons and strong enough to destroy them. And in the dark we can pretend that nothing has changed. That we are as innocent as we once were. That the evils of the world have not raped us of our purity.

That our love is enough.

So in the darkness we bask in its light. It's not harsh, or garish like the sun. Or at least not the midday sun that burns. The golden illumination of our love causes us both to glow, our skin luminous and our minds incandescent as they merge together in accordance with our flesh. In darkness, pleasure is no sin.

I'm always gone when he wakes. He's never there when the sun urges me into consciousness. I don't remember what it's like to leave the arms of Morpheus for those of a lover. I miss it. But how can you miss something you don't remember?

Sometimes I think all my rationality is used up during the day. While I try to find reasons why we're fighting. Try to explain how it's necessary to train children to fight. Why teenagers make the best SeeDs. Of course SeeD isn't the point of Balamb Garden. It never was.

The point of Garden is us.

Liberi Fatali.

The Fated Children. My sister, my brothers and myself. Six of us able to save the world. One of us able to destroy it.

How I wish I were that one. To spare him. To take the anguish, the pain, and lift them from his shoulders. It is not a weight that he should have to bear. I see it. Behind the smirk past the arrogance and beyond the pretence: he's cracking.

It won't be long now until he crumbles. Until he burns in the fires of his own glory. And I won't be able to heal him. Not this time. Each time we're together I'm only papering over the cracks. I love him. But it's not enough in the light.

And soon the sun will rise. And it won't set. And we will bother shatter.


	2. Light

**Light**

Time Compression didn't quite work the way it was supposed to. At least not for me. I washed up on the shore of Centra by the Orphanage like everyone else. Just three days late. It had worked as smoothly as it was supposed to for the others.

When I emerged, coughing and spluttering from the waves, it was to find the old stone house broken and empty. I felt like I were exploring my ruins of my own heart.

Alone, and shattered, I stood in what had once been the room we all slept in, with our Matron just down the hall.

There was a noise from behind me, and with a strangled sob I turned to see the man I knew I would find. Or he would find me. We met in the middle of the room.

And broke. Splintered into intermingled fragments of people.

"Quistis..."

"I'm sorry."

We do anything only thing we can do.

We rebuild.


	3. Dawn

**Dawn**

I'm sorry.

There's only so many times you can say that and not find it tedious.

I'm so sick of feeling guilty. All fucking day long I feel guilty. Sometimes it's not as bad as the day before. Sometimes it's worse. But of course, admitting that I've had enough of feeling guilty...makes me feel guilty. Because how can you stop feeling guilty? When you know that for what you've done, what you've been and seen and succumbed to...is unforgivable. Inexcusable. There's nothing that you can do to take back the past.

Do they not think I'd reach back if I could? Do the frightened parents who pull their children away from me think me so callous? I want to stop them, to demand – no, to ask, since I have no right to demand anything – that they stop and look at me. Really _look_. At _me. _Past what they've learned to see, beyond what they've known to fear. And then tell me that they don't see it.

I'm being eaten alive.

There has to be something, surely. A spark or a drop of the agony that tears at my lungs must appear in my eyes when they look at me. But nobody meets my eyes anymore. Even the angry, heartbroken parents who rage that I killed their children, who spit in my face. They're worse, if possible, than the people who don't see. Because they do see. A killer who doesn't care, a murderer to whom it matters not is easy to hate. When – if – they sense my guilt, how can they hate me then? When they know I feel remorse... And it makes them angry again. They are angry that I've robbed them of their hate just as I've robbed them of their loved ones.

I'm not asking for pity. I don't want pity, I've always had an almost phobic aversion to it. I want forgiveness. And I know that's not possible. It's probably a good thing that it remains beyond my reach. Redemption would be far too dangerous a thing for me. A clean slate would be too easy to make new mistakes on. The past is there so that its mistakes can never be repeated.

I still don't understand, though. There is very little that vexes me. Yet one question burns at the core of my mind. It is the question that keeps me awake at night, watching her sleep.

How do I still have Quistis?

It doesn't makes _sense. _At all. Whatsoever. Not even the tiniest scrap of of logic.

It never did, of course.

Is it a dream? Am I one day going to wake up and find I've done none of it – and that's why I have a right to claim her? When we were both young, and clean – as clean as trained mercenaries can be – we were opposites. Quiet, calm stillness versus loud and unceasing movement. Modesty and arrogance. Opposites then, yes, but now we are the antithesis of the other. It's far deeper now, more primal. Light against dark. Ice opposed to fire. How does the angel love the demon?

She's another reason I have to feel guilty. I've chained her to myself. Though I never asked her to be, she's my life-raft. The only thing keeping me from drowning. And in that perpetual struggle...what if the wrong one of us dies? It isn't possible for me or for anyone to describe the depth of my love for her, so I won't try. I can say why, though. I love her because she's my counterpart, my other self. Because she angers and infuriates me better than anyone else can. Because she's the only one that can cool me. Because she is fidelity personified. Get a dictionary. Look up 'devotion'. Definition: see Quistis Trepe. I love her because she looked her friends full in the face and told them, with no shame in her gaze...that she loves me.

And that's what I don't understand. That _she _loves _me. _That she's willing to put herself to any lengths, to bear my cross as her own, that she's prepared to lose the people dearest to her because they have a perfectly rational hatred of me.

I feel guilty for that too.

Yet when I'm with her, and she _does_ look at me with those clear blue eyes, I feel that maybe, just possibly, one day in the distant future...I could find redemption. It's in the way we make love, I think. Or in the clarity of her laugh. The fact that she does still laugh. She promises silently that I can find the light again. And how can an angel lie?

So I hold to that vow. I don't have a choice.

That's not to say the guilt disappears, though. It lingers like I'm carrying rocks instead of organs. It fluctuates from an ache behind my eyes to a head-splitting migraine. The sharp spike of pain has stabbed especially deeply recently, when Quistis is bent over the toilet in the mornings. When sometimes, if she thinks I'm not looking, she regards the soft curve of our child with a sad graveness in her beautiful face. I know what she's thinking. She's condemned herself to this fate. How can she choose it for our baby?

I wonder if they would not both be better off without me. All I'd need is one quick drive of Hyperion into my chest. It would take away all our problems. But that's the coward's way out. That's the path you choose when there's no other option. And if one good thing can be said of me, it's that I'm no coward. No. I'm not going to give in to the guilt, or to the nightmares that wake me even when I do manage to sleep.

Some people say they live day by day. I have no choice.

If I stop for even a moment then the darkness will find me. The light that Quistis sheds won't be enough to illuminate my way, and I'll take a wrong step. It will be my last. Things aren't as dark as they once were. That's something.

The phrase most often used by my long-suffering partner? Things can only get better. She has to keep saying it, because when I say it, it's not convincing.

--

Then, unexpectedly, light breaks.

After many many hours of Quistis screaming and sweating, and me feeling more guilty– our daughter is born. And she's...There _aren't _words.

Yet there are a thousand, each as inadequate as the last.

She's tiny, and she's screaming, and her face is scrunched up, and she's _mine_.

I know that in fact she's _ours_, but just for a second – she stops crying. And she looks at me. I know that logically she can't see me, because newborns can't see anything clearly. But I swear she can. She has green eyes. Like mine. She's marked as mine forever. And there's no judgement in her gaze, none of the grave sadness that marks her mother's face.

Except– I look up from the bundle in my arms to look at Quistis's face, only to see my own expression there. Joyful astonishment that we've done this. She doesn't look weary anymore, or tense. She looks... And it takes me a moment to think, because her expression is something I haven't seen in years. She's _happy. _

I laugh, and startle the baby back into crying. Quistis laughs too, and we're a family again. We were together before, but this child – this most wonderfully sacred of things – has made us whole.

I didn't want a fresh start. Didn't deserve one, and knew that if I had one it would only lead to not feeling guilty, and I needed to feel guilty. I still do. But that light at the end of the tunnel? Looks a whole lot closer now. Because my clean slate is wailing in my arms. She's new. She hasn't happened yet. I can help her to happen. I can help her to live her life as she should, as she wants to.

"Well what do you know?" I ask softly, to no one in particular.

I place a kiss on Quistis's sweaty forehead. "What shall we call her?" she asked wearily.

I regard our daughter again for a moment. "Dawn."

--

A/N: Just a short one but I didn't want to do another multi-chapter thingy. Hope u liked it anyway!


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